5 Things I Just Learned After 14 Years of Business

five business lessons that I just learned crossing 250 million in 2024 so the first one was the cost of change it was the first time that I've actually quantified how much does changing something in the business actually cost so if you would imagine a straight line right and saying okay this is normal business activity right straight line is going across now let's imagine we want to change something right so that's like our normal revenue but then we decide you know what I'm going to change something in the business so what ends up happening is this little line kind of dips down and I've estimated just for my kind of like this again there's no science behind this just my estimate that I get about a 20% decrease in effectiveness across any function that I'm going to change especially if it's manual now if you split test a headline that's different but if you're like hey we're changing our onboarding process or we're changing our sales process or we're changing our outbound process or we're changing our something that people are involved with um we tend to get a decrease immediately of 20% in a performance all right which is pretty significant and so as soon as I realized that we had almost this guaranteed cost of change which is about 20% I was able to quantify what things were worth doing because if you're anything like me I have like this big list of stuff where I'm like man we need to improve this we need to improve this we need to improve this and I have all these ideas of things that I think that'll improve it but when I actually am honest with myself and I think huh how much is number one going to actually improve the business if I say well I think it maybe get us a 5% improvement well if I have a guaranteed 20% decrease or decrement in performance and I have a 5% incremental increase in performance do I want to take a 20% guaranteed loss to have a potential for a 5% gain probably not and so what's ended up happening is that there's all these little 5% 5% little improvements that I think could happen but there's only like one or two 20 30 50% plus improvements I think we can do in the business and so what happens is some of these things I just choose to never do and I'll try not to stay explicit here but some stays you just have to accept that the business will not be perfect but your chase of perfection will actually make your current business worse because you're constantly changing things but let me let me spell this out one more level so let's say you have your 20% loss right now let's say you do something that is good right and it's you know up you start going up right 20% loss it starts going back up but what happens if you at the same time say "Oh well now I'm going to start changing something else. " Right and so basically you incur this permanent 20% decrease because you're always changing something so you're always 20% below where you should be in the business 20% is a lot often times in the business my business has done exceptionally well and I just let them breathe because here's the other part that no one tells you if you change nothing you get about a 5% guaranteed improvement think about how crazy that is if you change nothing you justupup 5% you can book it think about GDP partially some people are like "Oh that must be uh you know that could be in relation to education which in the US it certainly isn't. " It could be in relation to technology in terms of GDP improvement or it could be an increase because of population which in the US there's no population increase or not really for me I just kind of see that across all businesses that if you just let people do stuff they just get better at it right people get more efficient at it i'll leave you one tactical framework that you can kind of use to think through this which is this is actually from the investing world that I've borrowed as an entrepreneur which is called ICE all right and so it's an acronym I stands for impact which is like how big that's that 20% that's that 50% how big of an impact do I think this is going to make on the business right if I had to make like if this works it's going to do this the second is well how confident am I that it's going to work that's the C which is what's my confidence level so I got this big thing with low confidence or this medium thing with high confidence i'll probably take medium with high confidence right and then the third is ease which is going to come into a combination of how many resources are we going to have to deploy to do this and also what's the timeline that we're going to have to do this on impact confidence ease and so we actually do this like I have this massive sheet that it's called growth and I have it in all caps and this is uh this is how I like how I get my add is I put it all on this list which will probably be the second big tactic is that I have every big idea that I want to try and I have to like get it out and spell it out and say all the things that I want to do and I just put it somewhere because the team can't handle the amount of ideas that I have and probably your team can't either you have to just like scratch that itch in some way i do it by documenting so I don't forget it and then whenever the team has more bandwidth I go back to that list and I'm like all right let's order this which one has the highest impact which one do we think is going to work which one's going to be the easiest we tabulate those together and we're like "Okay this is the one that we're going to try this one we know has a 30% shot or a 50% chance increase.

" That's basically thing number one and it has I've tried to teach this down our portfolio and also what we do at acquisition. com is that you just need to be willing to leave some things not perfect so that the business can incur as few guaranteed costs of change and when you are going to make a change make sure it's worth it so so far number one we covered the cost of change right so this is making sure that you are only taking bets that have 20% or higher upside to be worth the guaranteed cost that you're going to incur and the framework that I use is ICE impact confidencees all right so that's number one so the second thing is I used to have this idea about the virality of products so I've talked a lot about referrals i talked a lot about word of mouth and I still obviously believe in that but I would say that I've I've had this big pendulum swing in the very beginning of my career uh you know and especially if you're you know sub a million you just got to promote right you just got to let people know about your stuff no one knows you exist you got to advertise right you got to learn how to sell cool that's zero to a million no questions asked that's what it is now to expand beyond that I was like okay we kind of pendulum swing back to like we got to we got to make it super viral right word of mouth is you know the best way to to grow a business but I've thought more and more about this and I think that it's a it's an it depends answer now there are some products that you want for sure to have people who buy and then buy again that you want them to you know reoccur with you as in like if I buy a Coca-Cola product I might buy you know a can today and I might buy a can at a restaurant later this week and so it's like am I on a subscription no but I buy again and again and again right or you have you know your internet which you just never cancel out of right either of those are things that are recurring they have high revenue retention but that is different than virality right that's very different so on one level you have does it stick on the other level you have do people share it with other people this is the nuance of understanding that's kind of shifted for me this year which is that some companies like especially B2B there's sometimes disincentives for a customer to bring in a competitor of theirs right if you service two types of similar businesses uh they have a literally a disincentive to tell people about it like they don't want anyone to know how you're helping them in whatever way right so that's kind of like thing number one you have like a negative pressure on word of mouth the second issue is that not even if you didn't have negative pressure word of mouth there has to be some sort of density in terms of the frequency of communication that your customers have with other potential customers so if I've got a guy who runs a a metal shop that specializes in aerote tech for that guy to have very frequent communication with other aerotech companies that might use my software my internal my internal tech or whatever it is that I that I help them with why is he going to be talking to competitors and if he is talking to competitors like why would he want to share all my stuff you can understand why sometimes it's not about word of mouth and this is just a nuance of understanding that I would think is kind of my belief set is broken because I was very hardcore on like everything can grow on word of mouth period but that's just not always the case the gold standard should absolutely be revenue retention bar none full stop and I can say that with absolute confidence no matter what business you're in for B2B your B TOC you want to be able to get recurring or reoccurring revenue but the virality typically is going to be more on the consumer side so if you have a really good soda you're you as a customer is not like oh I don't want to tell my friend that this soda is really good you know I've got this shirt it finally fits me cool well do I know other guys who are built more like me yes do I have high frequency of communication with them at least digitally yes okay cool so I'm going to have there's some viral kind of coefficient there that goes in and that applies to also consumer brands that are not tech i want to be really clear about that like for those of you who have you know the drop shipping e-commerce retail products it's like you still absolutely need to have word of mouth that grows the business there are just some businesses that are just never going to have that and for everybody you want to retain so that was lesson number two from a tactical perspective for that lesson the big thing I would just want to measure is what percentage of customers that I have at the beginning of this year that 12 months later are still buying from me that's the metric that we look at we have a 100 customers at the beginning of the year and at the end of the year 50 of those people are still buying so this is you know day zero or you know gen one whatever gen one and then December 31 how many of them are still buying if I have 50 versus the 100 then I have 50% revenue retention now you can have logo retention which is a second nuance of this logo retention is of the 100 customers do I have 50 customers or did I go from 100 customers to 25 customers but those 25 customers really like me and they now spend twice as much so that's the difference between revenue retention and logo retention for me we look at revenue retention because that's what we care about it's like okay if we just know that these 50 now that they're in are just going to keep paying and potentially even growing between 50 to 100 next year this is a monster business this is what we look at and we obsess over in any business that we invest in now no matter what you might not have a viral product for word of mouth but if you want seven different ways that you can generate word of mouth inside of the $100 million leads book I've got a whole chapter on referrals and I took out the things that were the actual best ways that I have seen from a tactical perspective so I say I have six kind of thematic things are like these are things that you can do to your product to improve stick to improve activation to improve the number of customers who actually want to stay and continue to pay with you and then on the other side I have basically the tactics that I have seen work best for me and our businesses and so these are things that actually drew in referrals so I have this whole section on one side of referrals two-sided referrals how to ask for the at the right time so timing is a huge component of it how to run referral events how to have ongoing referral programs unlockable referral bonuses seven different tactics that I've used work inside of the under million elites book you can grab them somewhere on my site or on Amazon number two is making sure that the highest priority for the business is going to be revenue retention not necessarily virality because not all products are meant to be viral but if you are in a business that is consumer focused or something that doesn't have one a disincentive to share and a high frequency of interactions between your customers with one another people who have basically high overlap so they talk to lots of people who could potentially buy a product if these two things are you have a high disincentive and you have low frequency then you're just not going to have virality in the product and you don't have to worry about it but if you do then obviously you want to have both number three I've been very obsessed with the concept of LTV to CAC i've talked about it a lot which is basically how much does it cost you to customer versus how much money you get from that customer over the lifespan specifically in gross profit not lifetime revenue now the reason I I like to always delineate this and I say LTGP which is a mouthful is because most of the literature that exists on LTV so lifetime value for a customer how much they pay you in gross profit over time is typically written in the software world and software tends to be virtually 100% gross margins in most businesses many businesses look at that literature and then say "Oh well let me just say someone stays with me for 10 months they pay $100 a month therefore my lifetime value is $1,000. " Well that's only true if you sell information media or software something has zero incremental cost but a lot of businesses don't have that if you sell chocolate chip cookies and the cookies cost you $20 for each of those $100 shipments I mean these are expensive cookies but let's just go with it so this cost you 20 bucks for every $100 shipment your lifetime value is not $1,000 so we have our hundred bucks right times 10 months that's the revenue what we're looking at is $80 because we have to take out the 20 in cost times the 10 months which actually equals $800 which is our real lifetime gross profit which in the business world sometimes people refer to as CLV or LTV they all more or less mean the same thing which is how much money you going to get from the customer now I put this as a frame for the big lesson that I had which is in the software world the big rule of thumb is 3 to one that's the big rule of thumb i actually now having worked with a lot of different businesses invested different businesses I think there's nuance to it so let me explain this is actually pretty cool so there's three components to a business that I I think influence that number so you have the attraction component which is you know the advertising how are we advertising how we getting people in how are we letting them know how are we generating leads then we have the conversion whatever your sales motion is right sales and then finally you've got delivery right or fulfillment how are we going to get people whatever they whatever they chose to pay for right so if we have these kind of three functions the extent to which you need to have high LTV to CAC is predicated on how manual each of these processes is so let me explain if you have paid ads which I would consider uh very high leverage and very like one person could write a gazillion dollars of paid ads high leverage cool that's number one if we had a conversion process that's through a checkout page so it's automated then that's going to be something else that's going to give us leverage okay and then third is let's say that we have software as our backend that has unlimit like we have no supply limitations there's no logistics limitations and pretty much it just works if you're in one of those businesses then you absolutely can be at 3:1 LTV to CAC over long haul fine you could even be at you know 1.

5 to one i mean it wouldn't be ideal but depending on the size and scale you could still make money doing it put $100 in get 150 back do it over and over again if that's only true for them what is it for a construction business what is it for a a plumbing company what is it for an e-commerce business the other extreme I'm going to just paint the extremes and you can kind of understand the middle if I had instead of paid ads I had manual outbound so outreach or whatever you want to call it outreach reaching out to people one-on-one with the team and then from a conversion process I've got one-on-one sales and then from a delivery process I've got call it you know concierge one-on-one or even many to one services then I'm going to want an LTV to CAC ratio that's going to reflect that for me if I had a business like this and this is going to shock some of you but just bear with me i'm going to want this thing to be like 20 to1 or more now some of you guys are like there's no way it's impossible i would say I've made the material the vast majority of the material wealth in my life at 30 to1 or higher and I've done it multiple times and during those periods of time is when a lot of the basically the wealth that I've accumulated has come in but in the times in between instead of trying to scale something that's at you know 5 one or 8 one I'm just going to continue to tinker I'm going to start I'm going to stick with my one location I'm going to keep working on the model and just keep tinkering with it until eventually we get the economics that we need in order to scale what if I'm doing paid ads ads but we do one-on-one sales and we sell media or information or something like that then it's like then you're going to be somewhere in between but I have this as my rule of thumb is that the 3:1 only matters at the companies that have 100% scale 100% leverage across all three components here if you have manual cost all three you're going to be at I would at least want to be at 20 to1 i shoot for 30 plus a lot of people can't even believe that fine so you know fit it to whatever your goals are i really do believe that you can just keep tinkering with the business keep tinkering in the offer and find a way to get it so that you can have a huge discrepancy between these two numbers because that's what allows you to scale if you want to scale a business that's more manual which if some of you guys are listening 78% of businesses in America are are service- based businesses so this applies to you as you go into colder and colder markets you will convert a smaller percentage of customers these are customers who are less likely to purchase from you but you have a bigger pool of people so that's kind of the trade-off but when you go to those colder colder markets smaller percentage convert meaning it costs you more to get those customers basically you sell more people you're going to have more infrastructure that has to get built into the business so you have layers of management that will start costing you and not necessarily always be alpha they're not going to be value additive with these two things that are working against you you have to have this very large discrepancy between what it cost you to get a customer and what you're going to make from that customer in order to weather that storm and allow you to kind of grow into that sh you can almost like grow into your LVD CAC which is kind of how I think about it so if you're thinking about this for you number one know what your true LTV to CAC is and make sure you're doing it off gross profit not off of revenue and then number two if you want to scale make sure that it your your LTV to CAC ratio is appropriate for the level of leverage that you have within your existing business across all three functions so you might be wondering why doesn't the ratio still cover it for a supermanual business versus a business that's entirely automated the main reason is lumpiness you have to bring people in for outbound that are not going to be proficient so you're gonna have to incur the cost of new SDRs that either aren't going to work out at all or aren't going to work out in the beginning and then eventually going to work out so you have to incur that cost but imagine incurring that cost and then also incurring the cost of new salespeople who actually going to be trying to convert those prospects and they're going to suck and they're going to lose opportunities and you're going to be paying them while they literally close fewer sales for you so you lose twice and then also sometimes you spend all this money and time to get them hopefully to be proficient and then they aren't so they just lost you money three different ways the third uh component of this is the delivery piece which is like okay I'm going to have to onboard and hire all of these other people and if you have anything that's like higher expertise then forget about it it's going to take even longer for you to both find these people and then also to train these people up but again recruiting itself can be a super expensive task like there's recruiting firms and if you want to recruit a high level person it usually cost you 25 sometimes 30% of their first year pay and if you're paying someone $300,000 a year it's like you're going to pay 80 grand just to get somebody let alone hope that they're proficient and you still have all this onboarding so you have this lumpiness of of people that aren't going to be effective and if you at 3:1 boom you're done like it's there's no like that 3 to1 disappears real fast it's like you have this lumpiness of like okay boom we got these new SDRs in cra like now this is coming back up but then this starts growing down so now like we start at 20 to1 or 30 to1 but it's like we kind of it's more like a wave like it it undulates with the efficiency of the business and how stable it is as you're scaling and the faster you're scaling the more inefficient it's going to be so that's why you need to have as much as you can in terms of LTV to CAC it's padding the third piece here is that we just went over it LTV to CAC one we want to make sure that we're doing this off of gross profit not revenue and secondarily we want to make sure that if we are highly leveraged then we can be at 3:1 but if we're low leverage we want to be at 20 plus you know 21 or higher and again this sounds crazy and unrealistic for a lot of people i get it fine at the very least be at 15 to one please for the love of God I promise you it's possible you just have to work on it longer than you expect which brings us to number four let's dive into it number four i've thought I've said a lot about this which is that the 1 to 3 million area is a huge swamp right we call it the swamp at least at acquisition. com and why is 1 to3 million so hard now we've we've noticed that it's hard but we were like why is that range hard now for those of you who are like this is not real for me i'm just trying to make my first $10,000 a month just keep listening because believe it or not some of these things will apply to you so if you're at 1 to $3 million why is this one of the hardest periods because usually from 0 to a million you can usually do it with like you and two three people it's not that hard for you to keep track of the team you can usually run very high margins especially if you're a sole proprietor you're basically just selling your time which is fine right you don't need to obsess about your passive income before you max out your active income good idea by the way a lot of billionaires very high active income FYI anyways as you're scaling up that first you know 500 800 sometimes million dollars a year is actually in some ways somewhere more profitable than the next 2 3 4 million because you have to install this level of infrastructure because you're like I just can't do it anymore now you can always just keep jacking prices and that's fine and I'm a big advocate of that but if you're like "No I think this is the price that I want to service at and I want to do more volume. " Then you're going to have to put put in more infrastructure but this is the math that I just realized is why it's so hard so let's say you've got a a $2 million business you're right in the middle of the swamp okay and you probably noticed anecdotally for those of you who are kind of like in this business world there's a lot of people in the 1 to3 million range like a ton ton of businesses to be fair doesn't mean they're making$1 to3 million in profit which means they're doing 1 to three million in revenue big difference all right but let's say we've got a $2 million business okay and let's say that they're doing 20% margins all right so they're doing $400,000 per year in eBay or profit okay so we got $400,000 here now here's the stick at this point for the business to evolve for the business to level up the entrepreneur typically has what I would consider an impossible choice you have to choose one of two things and sometimes the option is both which is path one instead of getting more help I'm just going to work even more i'm going to go from you know 12 hours a day to working 16 hours a day i'm going to stop taking weekends off and I'm going to basically get through this hump so I can push my way to $10 million a year which you can do it is hard or I'm going to bring in somebody who's going to help me get there and I'm going to maintain a relatively long schedule but still you know not the same as working 16 hours 7 days a week those are the kind of the two impossible choices which is like other person here's the tough part if you have $400,000 in profit that's left over if you want to bring in a stud who's going to really help you there you're probably going to be looking at $250,000 per year in all-in comp kind of at a minimum to bring somebody who's a real star into the business let's look at that in comparison to what the profit is for this business you're looking at risking more than half of your income on one person with the hopes that it's going to work out but what happens when this person comes in and then they aren't that good they don't expand your capacity it's like well shoot I just lost half my profit for a year and then I'm still not further along this is why this is the swamp and I and I I've just spent a lot of time thinking about that because I was like why is one to $3 million so hard you need the help but you don't have the money to afford the help and so you either just got to go overdrive and go nutso mode right or you make a huge bet proportional to what you have in terms of net profit to bring this person in and that's why it's so hard and so if you're in the swamp right now my encouragement to you is this i have almost always been the like I'm going to go into overdrive and I'm going to hire the person because the idea is what if I just do things that are more unscalable but still generate higher profits for the business so that I can afford to take two or three shots with somebody else who's coming into the business knowing that I'm not going to hit it out of the park on the first shot i mean if I do I'm stoked but I want to win either way and so either I'm going to win with more profit faster or less profit slower but I want to make sure that I'm guaranteed to win i kind of do this as a plus scenario so if you happen to be in that 1 to3 million range it's something that we know obviously a lot about with acquisition.

com and we put together a scaling road map so when we looked at our whole portfolio and the companies that we worked with over the years we're like what are the things where do we get stuck and how do we get unstuck right and when we put it all together on a map what we realize that it actually isn't by revenue it's by headcount you might be doing $1 to $3 million a year and be here or you might be doing $1 to $3 million a year and be at level five product size right so it really depends on the nature of the business that you're in if you want to know what level of the scaling revup you're at and more importantly what things we've done in the past for businesses of this size or at this stage to get to the next level then you go to acquisition. com/roadmap you put in your business information and it'll spit out and it'll help you figure out which stage you're at so that you can get to the next level on the thank you page if you would like our team to help figure out which stage you're at and those specific steps and personalize that we'd love to invite you out to Vegas you can book a call on the next page and if it's a fit love to see you and then the fourth thing we just covered is why 1 to 3 million is the hardest and the main thing is is cash flow and time you don't have the time and you don't have the cash flow to do more work but you have to in order to grow so either you work overtime or you bring someone else in to work overtime or you do both which is what I recommend and that means it's going to be hard which is why most people stay stuck so that's number four number five so 2024 was probably the first year that I didn't have FOMO so fear of missing out it is the hardest part of business is staying focused it's the hardest part the reason you you hear Bezos talk about it you hear you hear Zuckup talk about it you hear Jobs talk about it you hear Elon talk about it like you have to be incredibly focused on what the points of greatest leverage are in the business the reason that this was a big lesson for me not the focus part I obviously talk about that but I was like why why was this year different why was this the first year where I didn't have FOMO it's actually because the idea of rush is where the fear of missing out comes from it's the arbitrary timeline that I set for myself that I just grab from thin air and then I measure myself against this thing that I made up to make myself miserable at all times from whatever success I'm achieving in thinking about that I I have I've coined the term for myself which is that rush is imaginary it's made up it's completely made up there's only one caveat that I'll make to this which is and if this is you you probably already know if you have a business that has a tremendous network effect and there's a very small amount of people even a big amount of people in that network that you're trying to gather towards then yes it's likely that you have a winner take all business model and in which case you've probably already raised a ton of money and you're probably trying to aggressively grow to capture that network so that eventually you can turn something into a profitable business fine for everybody else who's not running a tech platform that's trying to build a network effect of some sort you don't need to rush there was uh Anie actually I don't think her her her episodes come out yet but anyways I'm going to give you a sneak peek so I was talking to Anie Trrog and she has um she has nail salons okay and so she has uh one core nail salon that worked really well and then she decided to partner with other people doing like three or four other nail salons and the biggest issue she has for growing right now is that her partnerships are kind of a mess i'll just put it like that why did you do these partnerships she said "Because if I had more locations I'd make more money. " And I said "Why didn't you just make more money with your existing location save up the cash and then open a second location all for yourself?

" The thing that I kept trying to tease out of her is I was like "She was just in a rush. " Like that was the reason she was just in a rush there's no actual reason for have three or four other different random partnerships with each of these locations and the thing is is that some of you guys are you do this there was a guy who was here at our headquarters yesterday he has a Tik Tok shop management thing right where he just like helps people start their their Tik Tok shops for e-commerce businesses and he was like "But I also have this brand that I started on my own using Tik Tok shop and it's doing really really well but I also want to start investing in I'm like dude what's the rush? " And so the counteraction like how do you how do you counter the rush how do you counter the rush and I think the way that I have countered the rush is to look at the people who have the ultimate version of my business who are the people who are 20 years ahead of me what do their businesses look like and what's interesting about this is that the vast majority of them have one massive business and in seeing that I was like huh almost none of them have multiple massive businesses they started elon is of course the one exception that everybody wants to bring up and if you're Elon you alreadying know how to speak alien so don't worry about this video but for everyone who doesn't know how to speak alien right for people who haven't just generated a hundred billion dollars in a year if you if you haven't done that yet then maybe consider every other person on the Forbes list that just did one thing for the entirety of their career and it's like Basos has Blue Origin yeah after 35 years of Amazon you've got Mrpanda still doing it's like but wait he owns he owns the Cosmo yeah but he also did that after 45 years of Panda Express and Panda Express is still his cash cow okay I've got this restaurant it's working well awesome think about starting this agency right for to help restaurants it's like dude what does the ultimate version of this look like the ultimate version of this look like either you go all in and you build an enterprise agency that only works with very large restaurant chains and those tend to be sticky and those tend to be valuable businesses but if you're like well I'm only dealing with small SMB restaurant owners for my agency show me one one agency that service SMBs in that,000 $1,500 maybe $2,000 a month mark who has a $100 million plus business even just re like revenue just show me one why doesn't it happen because it's a bad model every single agency goes up market and they serve enterprise and that's become really big look at Ogulvie look at Veayner right like look at Neil NP digital all of these are massive massive companies that only service really the Fortune 500 why because they're sticky because if you have volatile customers you'll have a volatile business if you have a volatile business you're not going to be able to weather the storms if you can't weather the storms you're not going to last long if you don't last long you're not going to get big how do you counteract the idea of rushing you have to look at the end state of the business what is the ultimate version of my restaurant look like it might be 2,000 locations nationwide what does the ultimate version of my agency look like it might be Oglev and Matters right it might be we're doing five billion dollars a year and let's look at the number one person in the space if what does the ultimate version of my lawn care business look like maybe it's a franchise maybe it's you privately hold it but no matter what it is it's probably not three different businesses that you're trying to say start all at the same time because you're in a rush because the thing is is that rush is what guarantees you're never going to get big and I'm saying this because this is something that has plagued me my whole career and so just this last year was the first year that I didn't have FOMO and I was like why is that and I just think that I've just failed and messed it up enough times to be like I just have to stick with one thing and here's the up part about this you have to accept that you you can't sleep with every girl you can't date every guy whatever it you know whatever your your your preference is the point is our life is so limited it's just so we just don't have that many we don't have that much time if you want to do big stuff you just don't have that much time because of that it's like you just have to accept the fact you just got to pick and you could have had four other timelines where you could have done each of these other things all the way to their extreme but the likelihood that you're going to do all four of those to the extreme when you start all four of them at the same time is zero it's not going to happen the first business is built on hard choices business is built on the amount of nos that you're able to make if you can't say no at the beginning of like I'm not going to just pick one of these paths right one of my favorite little definitions of d uh deciding comes from the Latin decaderee which means to cut off like if you want to decide you have to cut off you have to eliminate things if you have three different paths or four different things that you're considering pick for the love of God and the reason and the thing is is that you have made up some number because some person you know makes a certain amount of money or some person you know thinks that this amount of revenue is cool and so you're like why would it be cool so I want to hit that amount of revenue and because you don't know how to grow the business you're in you only know how to get to $100,000 a year you only know how to get to a million a year only know how to get to $3 million a year then your way of growing is doing more $3 million businesses when the reality is that you have to confront why is my $3 million business not a $10 million business and you have to figure out that problem that is the hard work i talked to a lady yesterday she was stuck at a million dollars a year for 10 years i I said "Why haven't you gone to to to $3 million a year like what's what's stopped you?

" Because she had a very clear model i was like "Why don't you just double how much you're doing? " And she was like "Well it's a pain. " And I was like "Oh cuz it's hard.

" Cuz it's hard she's like "No no it's not cuz it's hard. " And I was like "Well then why haven't you done it? " And she's like "Well it's just like it's just like it's inconvenient and there's like it's more it's more time aotment and all this stuff.

" And I was like "Yeah that sounds like hard sounds like hard it's hard for us to hear that we're not willing to do hard things because the hard changes.